But can an 11 year old actually decide that they want to train that hard? Where is the line?

I can hear the arguments already against setting any kind of boundary or hard and fast rule. Every kid is different, you’ll be holding some back. Suggesting any kind of stricture on how much coaches train their swimmers will be met with overwhelming opposition.

Later today I will record a podcast with Monica Strzempko and Sarah Ehekircher. If that first name sounds unfamiliar to you, then you’ll want to read this before you listen. We’ll go over some points of the story of both Monica and her daughter Anna in the pod, but the piece I linked to gives a lot more detail than we can cover in an hour.

First, why is it that an overwhelming amount of sporting people are so against the use of performance enhancing drugs? For starters, we find it abhorrent that the competitive field of play could be tilted by taking a substance. But it is not just the competitive balance of the substances.

The stakes for doing so seem to high. There are more people to tell you that you messed up than there ever were. That is a bit daunting. In the same vein, there is more room for personal growth than there ever has been. So here, in no certain order, are the posts I look back at over the last year with a little cringe on my face.

Later today I'll be recording a podcast with a long sought after guest: Susan Teeter. Susan was the coach of the Princeton University Women's Swimming and Diving team from 1984-2017. We're going to talk on this podcast specifically about what she's been up to since her "retirement" last year.

When I swam in college, I had a teammate whose shoulder always hurt when the hardest practices came. I have a vivid memory of grinding my way through what seemed like endless repetitions of 400s while he "did abs" on the pool deck.

Here's a blog I've been holding back for quite some time. You may have noticed a dip in my output over the last month or so. I'm going to be as honest as I possibly can be about that. I've been waiting for the time and place to have an effective way to communicate it.

Beyond the humanity and the mental and physical health concerns, it's also just better for your coaching. Imagine, if you could, a swimmer of yours training all year round, almost all day. Would you expect them to improve? Wait, Gregg Troy don't answer that!

I wouldn't accept that explanation from my four year old. In fact, there is a lot about this situation, despite the adult nature of the texts, that warrants such comparisons. We'd have to have a conversation about the lying on top of whatever she did wrong.

I hold my son's head with my right hand, the left hand scooped under his butt. He screams. I bounce. He errantly flails his hands. I bounce and "shushhhhh". He kicked his legs with all his might. I bounce.

Slowly but surely, he gets a little more limp in my arms. His eyes start to get heavy, then close intermittently. Eventually, he will slump entirely into sleep.

I've been a New Jersey resident for close to two years now. I still can't make heads or tails whatsoever of the geography. When I'm driving some way I've never been, it feels as if I change towns every few minutes.

That's not just my imagination though. NJ has 500+ municipalities packed into a tiny little state. Something about taxes, blah blah. You're not reading this for New Jersey politics

Which led me to tell Chuck that what I would write would not be like some episode of "Bar Rescue" or "Kitchen Nightmare" or any of that genre of show where a disgruntled "talent" visits a business and tears it to pieces before participating in a miraculous rebuild.

Chuck Batchelor had warned me that I need not show up so early, but I did anyway. He rolled in a few minutes later, and what followed could only be described as some light acrobatics in order to get some air flowing into the pool area.

Since starting this blog, I've gotten to a lot of areas in America that I never knew. I spent part of last fall out in Arizona in the pleasant hospitality of my friend Garrett McCaffrey and Grand Canyon University. I've visited Houston three times in the past year. I went back to Nebraska and saw a whole new part of the state.

That was all fantastic, but I have realized recently that I still know very little about what's going on within a short drive of my home base here in Jersey City, NJ. Likewise, it's been over a decade since I set foot on a pool deck in the LSC of my youth, New England

I understand how foolish it might seem to argue against the importance of coaches on the blog of a business that is literally my name plus the word "coaching". I'll do it anyway- the athletes that do our sport have gotten and continue to get far too little credit.

To me, though, that's just the surface level of the argument. There's something out there that would satisfy both Thorpe and his cohort and the "mental toughness" crowd. Rather than pillorying Thorpe, perhaps we ought to really listen to what he is saying.

One year before the men's ACC championship, the assistant coaches were tasked with each giving an inspirational speech to the guys. My friend Marty Hamburger stepped up to the plate big.

His speech, which I will paraphrase because this is kinda sorta a family blog, came down to one thing. There was a big difference between talk and action. You could talk about doing something, or what you wanted to do, but doing it was something other entirely.

Marty had two sons. He had done it. I'll let you fill in the rest.

The speech lightened the mood for everyone on a tense evening, and I was thinking about him last week when my son, our second child, was born.

Different Place

Four and a half years ago, when my daughter was born, I was head coach of a Danish swim club. I had just been selected (and declined to attend) a meet with the Danish Junior National team, because the meet was in Iceland and I didn't want to be far away if my wife went into labor.

I got a little flak from my colleagues at the time. Little did I know that would only be the beginning of the road I would have to navigate in my new dual role. This was Denmark, the land of parental leave. So I had fourteen days, which I won't complain about since many of my American readers probably experience going to work the very next day after their child is born.

I didn't get the fourteen days, however. I got called in a couple times, including interviewing and hiring a new coach just three days into my daughter's life. After that, it was back to the grind. I was coaching almost every morning and every weekday night.

During the first year, I would sleep away from home for 65 days, including several stretches of approximately 10 days. I remember I was in Croatia when my daughter crawled for the first time, struggling to watch on crappy wifi.

There was an essential conflict in what I did. The more successful I got, the more time I would be away from home. Shannon Rollason, a man I greatly admired for balancing his family and elite swim coaching, didn't sugarcoat it for me. I remember him telling me that with the Olympics approaching that time at home was going to grow even more scarce for him.

Examples

My own father hadn't taken an active role in raising me. He had, basically, just worked. He was an outstanding provider, and I grew up very well off. I emerged from an expensive, private liberal arts school with no college debt. I am not ungrateful for any of that.

He would often leave for work before I woke up. He would return for dinner from 6:00-:6:30, then go back to work. He worked Thanksgiving, Christmas and most other major holidays. When I started swimming I missed a lot of those dinners too.

It wasn't the path I wanted to follow, not the relationship I had chosen when I decided to marry my wife. I felt constantly pulled in two directions.

At one point, I remember returning from a meet, a frustrating weekend. I broke into tears at the kitchen table. I was exhausted, and I felt like I was failing at both of the things I wanted to be excellent at. I certainly didn't have a road map for either.

A Change

In September of 2015, my life changed. I stepped away from the grind and came home. Life was still stressful, to be sure. My mother was slowly dying from a brain tumor. My wife was starting up a new job.

But I had time to focus on doing one job extremely well- being a dad. I was home every morning and most nights. I walked my daughter to and from school, and made most of her meals. I had my weekends back.

To this day I'm extremely grateful that fate intervened and sent me home. I could have missed out on so much. I realized the simple truth that kids really benefit from a lot of time with their parents- my daughter was happy and thriving and our relationship grew stronger and stronger.

My greatest fear, of course, was that somehow my coaching skill would atrophy if I didn't spend all my time poolside. That was far from the truth. First off, parenting a small child gave me a lot more empathy for the children (and their parents) that I worked with every day.

I got patience that I never had, in spades. I relearned how to teach someone something. I got really lucky in that a swim club offered to let me work for them part-time, and basically define my own role. "We want you on the team" they said, and offered to let me do whatever I felt I was best at.

So finally, I learned to stop trying to be everything to everyone and just focus on a few things that I knew I could do really well.

Foundation

Which leads me to today. I founded this business on that principle. I was not going to try and do anything that I was ok at, or pretty good at. I was going to stick to a few things, and do them really well.

I thought there was a niche to carve out, one that could lead me to continue to do what I love (coach) and still be a father to my kids and the loving husband I wanted to be. I think that there are a lot of coaches with the same goal, trying to chart a similar path in a world that isn't always quite set up to make it convenient.

I got to make up for lost time with my first kid, with the second I won't have to. Later today, I'm going to leave for a little bit, stand next to a pool, and help some kids learn to do it a little bit better. It's a simple thing that I won't take for granted this time around

The longest one, which features some quotes from Schubert himself, begins with the title "Mark Schubert is a legend..." before asking the question that is the core of why Schubert is no legend. He doesn't belong in any of the multiple hall of fames he currently resides.

Lately I've been listening to a music mix that convinces me that I am rapidly moving towards the "old" portion of my life. I go out for a jog, or a dog walk, and I put on the "Top 100 Songs of 2002". That's right, I've decided effectively "screw new music". Let's just play what I listened to when I was eighteen and life was simple and easy.

Over the last couple weeks, significant challenges to two of the most popular Positive Psychology concepts have emerged. The Marshmallow test, a foundational piece of research behind GRIT, and the effect of growth mindset have each faced serious criticism.

I've seen both GRIT and growth mindset spread like wildfire in athletic environments. Do these new challenges mean we should throw them away just as quickly? Probably, not, but let's see what is going on with each argument